Appalachian History Series – Battle of Kingsport: Stoneman’s Opening Blow in Upper East Tennessee, December 13, 1864
On the morning of December 13, 1864, Union forces under Major General George Stoneman reached Kingsport on the North Fork of the Holston River during a winter raid aimed at breaking Confederate strength in Upper East Tennessee and southwest Virginia. In Stoneman’s official report, Kingsport appears not as an isolated local clash but as the first sharp obstacle on a larger expedition meant to push Confederate cavalry back, destroy the saltworks at Saltville, and tear up the railroad and supply network that helped sustain the Confederate war effort in the mountains.
The battle was small compared with the great armies fighting elsewhere in late 1864, but it mattered because geography mattered. The crossing at Kingsport stood on the road eastward toward Bristol, Abingdon, Marion, and Saltville. Tennessee Civil War Trails places the fight near the fields around Rotherwood, with Richard C. Morgan’s Confederate command holding the eastern bank of the Holston while Stoneman’s men massed on the west. State interpretive material also notes that the old Ross Bridge was in such poor condition that it could not simply carry the attack forward, which meant the Federals had to solve a river problem before they could continue their raid.
Why Kingsport Mattered
By December 1864, the Confederacy’s western war effort depended heavily on a few remaining resource centers. Camp Nelson’s National Park Service history of the Southwest Virginia Raid explains that Stoneman’s expedition was organized to strike the saltworks at Saltville and related industrial targets, as well as the transportation links that moved those resources. In that sense, Kingsport was the gate. If Stoneman could not force the Holston crossing and scatter the mounted Confederate screen there, the deeper raid into Virginia would slow or fail before it had truly begun.
The opposing forces were unequal in size but not in opportunity. Tennessee Civil War Trails and related state summaries place roughly 5,500 Union troops in the larger expedition and about 300 Confederates under Colonel Richard C. Morgan at Kingsport. Stoneman’s own report identified the force at the river as Duke’s old command, temporarily led by Morgan because Basil W. Duke was absent on leave. What Morgan lacked in numbers he made up for in position. His men held the bluffs on the eastern bank and could contest any direct crossing.
The Fight at the Holston
The official record of the battle is brief, but later accounts and battlefield interpretation help explain how the Union force broke the position. State marker text says that while part of Stoneman’s command demonstrated in front of the Confederate line, Colonel Samuel Patton led another body of troops roughly three miles upstream to Cloud’s Ford, crossed there, and then came down on the Confederate flank and rear. Kingsport local interpretation preserves the same essential memory, identifying Patton, a Kingsport man and Union officer, as the leader of the flanking movement that helped dislodge Morgan’s men from the east bank.
Stoneman’s report compresses the action into a few decisive lines. He wrote that after a short contest Gillem succeeded in crossing the river and then killed, captured, or dispersed the entire Confederate force, taking Richard Morgan himself along with the whole wagon train. A later Union regimental history added more color, recalling artillery fire across the river, a mounted push through deep water, and a rapid collapse once the flank attack and frontal pressure struck together. The exact minute by minute sequence is easier to trace in those later recollections than in the terse official reports, but the larger result is the same in every strong source. Morgan’s position broke, and the road east opened.
A Short Battle With Lasting Consequences
The National Park Service battle summary lists the Union organizations at Kingsport as Battery E, Kentucky Light Artillery, the 11th Michigan Cavalry, and the 8th, 9th, and 13th Tennessee Cavalry, with Union losses of 2 killed and 7 wounded. State interpretive material gives a fuller estimate for Confederate losses, reporting about 18 killed and 84 captured. Another participant history remembered twenty or thirty Confederates killed and many prisoners taken, including Morgan and his supply train. The precise Confederate casualty total varies by source, which is not unusual in a fast moving cavalry fight, but all dependable accounts agree that the Confederates were badly beaten and that Morgan was captured.
What followed shows why the fight deserves attention beyond Sullivan County. In the official report, Stoneman noted that during the afternoon and night of December 13 he pushed Burbridge’s command on toward Bristol in hopes of intercepting other Confederate forces, then followed with Gillem. Camp Nelson’s campaign history likewise presents Kingsport as the opening success in a raid that quickly rolled onward into Bristol and deeper into southwest Virginia before culminating in the destructive blows at Marion and Saltville. Kingsport was not the raid’s largest action, but it was its opening success, the first tactical problem solved and the first Confederate field command broken.
Contemporary newspaper coverage caught the same point, even in compressed telegraphic form. The Wheeling Daily Intelligencer of December 31, 1864, reported that Morgan’s force at Kingsport had been attacked and then killed, scattered, and captured. That kind of quick wartime summary lacked the detail of official military reports, but it shows how promptly the result entered the wider Northern news stream. Kingsport was understood at once as part of Stoneman’s successful winter offensive, not merely a local skirmish by the river.
Memory and the Battlefield
The battle also endured in local memory long after the war. Tennessee’s Civil War GIS project continues to list Kingsport among the state’s wartime engagements, and the battlefield’s memory survives in trail markers and local heritage interpretation near Netherland Inn Road and along the Greenbelt. At the archival level, the Kingsport Public Library’s L. R. Ahern Collection includes a “Battle of Kingsport” piece by Edith Robertson dated December 13, 1964, while the Muriel C. Spoden Collection includes a dedicated “Kingsport, Battle of Kingsport (1864)” file, evidence that the fight remained part of Kingsport’s historical consciousness well into the twentieth century.
Kingsport’s Civil War fight was brief, cold, and overshadowed by larger battles, yet it was more than a footnote. It was the moment Stoneman’s raid proved it could force a defended crossing, seize prisoners and supplies, and carry the war deeper into the Appalachian corridor linking East Tennessee and southwest Virginia. In that sense, the Battle of Kingsport was not simply a local engagement fought beside the Holston. It was the opening blow that helped clear the way to Saltville and marked another turning point in the long struggle for the mountain South in the final winter of the Civil War.
Sources & further reading
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “L. R. Ahern Collection, c.1700s-1971 and undated.” Finding aid. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/r-ahern-collectionc-1700s-1971-and-undated/
Kingsport Public Library and Archives. “Muriel C. Spoden Collection, 1800-2000.” Finding aid. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.kingsportlibrary.org/finding_aids/muriel-c-spoden-collection-1800-2000/
Mason, Frank Holcomb. The Twelfth Ohio Cavalry: A Record of Its Organization, and Services in the War of the Rebellion, Together with a Complete Roster of the Regiment. Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company, 1899. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/twelfthohiocaval00maso
National Park Service. “11th Regiment, Michigan Cavalry.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UMI0011RC
National Park Service. “13th Regiment, Tennessee Cavalry.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UTN0013RC
National Park Service. “8th Regiment, Tennessee Cavalry.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UTN0008RC
National Park Service. “9th Regiment, Tennessee Cavalry.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UTN0009RC
National Park Service. “Independent Battery E, Kentucky Light Artillery.” Civil War Soldiers and Sailors System. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/search-battle-units-detail.htm?battleUnitCode=UKY000EYAL
National Park Service. “Southwest Virginia Raid.” Camp Nelson National Monument. December 17, 2022. https://www.nps.gov/cane/southwest-virginia-raid.htm
National Park Service. “Tennessee Civil War Battles.” Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.nps.gov/civilwar/tennessee.htm
Scott, Samuel W., and Samuel P. Angel. History of the Thirteenth Regiment, Tennessee Volunteer Cavalry, U.S.A.: Including a Narrative of the Bridge Burning, the Carter County Rebellion, and the Loyalty, Heroism and Suffering of the Union Men and Women of Carter and Johnson Counties, Tennessee, During the Civil War. Philadelphia: P. W. Ziegler, 1903. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/cu31924030916047
Taylor, Oliver. Historic Sullivan: A History of Sullivan County, Tennessee, with Brief Biographies of the Makers of History. Bristol, TN: King Printing Co., 1909. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/historicsullivan00tayl
Tennessee Department of Tourist Development. “Battle of Kingsport.” Tennessee Civil War Trails. Accessed March 18, 2026. https://classic.tnvacation.com/civil-war/place/284/battle-of-kingsport/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Civil War Sourcebook.” Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.tnsos.net/TSLA/cwsourcebook/
Tennessee State Library and Archives. “Genealogical Fact Sheets About Sullivan County.” Accessed March 18, 2026. https://sos.tn.gov/tsla/pages/genealogical-fact-sheets-about-sullivan-county
Tennessee Civil War GIS Project. “TN Civil War GIS Project.” Accessed March 18, 2026. https://tnmap.tn.gov/civilwar/
United States. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I, Volume XLV, in Two Parts. Part 1, Reports, Correspondence, etc. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895. The Portal to Texas History. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142228/
United States. War Department. The War of the Rebellion: A Compilation of the Official Records of the Union and Confederate Armies. Series I, Volume XLV, in Two Parts. Part 2, Correspondence, etc. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1895. The Portal to Texas History. https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth142229/
Virginia Chronicle. “Page 3, Daily Intelligencer, December 31, 1864.” Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.virginiachronicle.com/?a=d&d=DI18641231.1.3
Duke, Basil Wilson. History of Morgan’s Cavalry. Cincinnati: Miami Printing and Publishing Co., 1867. Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/31232
Historical Marker Database. “Battle of Kingsport.” Accessed March 18, 2026. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=108218
Author Note: This article reconstructs the Battle of Kingsport from the Official Records, participant histories, contemporary newspapers, and Tennessee archival leads. As always, I have tried to privilege primary sources first and to use later local histories mainly to clarify landscape, memory, and battlefield detail.